The Eleventh Hour (TV story)
The Eleventh Hour 'is the first episode of the fifth series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Steven Moffat, directed by Adam Smith and featured Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond. Overview To be added Synopsis Little Amelia Pond is alerted late at night by the destruction of her garden shed following the landing of a blue police box on top of it. Out of the box emerges an eccentric man in bedraggled clothes, who calls himself 'the Doctor'. Freshly regenerated, the Doctor is called into action to help recapture an alien fugitive that escapes through a dominating crack in Amelia's wall. Promising to return in 5 minutes, the critically-damaged TARDIS brings him back 12 years to late, when the fugitive Prisoner Zero's jailers have come to find it. With a twenty-minute interval granted before they burn the planet, the Doctor, along with the fully-grown Amy, must find the prisoner or else see the planet destroyed... Plot The episode opens with a pan over the Earth as it zooms in on the skies of London where the TARDIS, still damaged, flies manically over the city, with the newly-regenerated Doctor hanging out of the doors. He manages to pull himself inside the ship after avoiding colliding with Big Ben when the ship blows up again and rockets off into the night sky. Meanwhile, little Amelia Pond prayers to Santa Claus and asks him to send for help in looking into the crack in her wall, through which she hears voices. Before she finishes speaking, the TARDIS crashes on her garden shed. She goes out to investigate as the doors fly open and the Doctor sticks his head out of them, having climbed all the way up from the swimming pool in the library. Amelia asks if he's come about the crack in her wall when he falls to the ground, still in the process of regenerating. He starts asking for food but he rejects everything he's served, in a rather exaggerated fashion, and winds up serving himself fish fingers dipped in custard. He takes the fact that she's not alarmed by him, his box or anything he's doing as a sign that she is really frightened of the crack in her wall. He goes upstairs to inspect it, scanning the crack with his sonic screwdriver before finding that the crack isn't a crack in the wall but one in the world. He places a glass to the crack and hears an ominous voice declare 'Prisoner Zero has escaped'. Taking Amelia's hand, the Doctor opens the crack with his sonic and a giant eyeball looks back at them through it before sealing it up behind it. On looking around the house, the Doctor suspects that Prisoner Zero must have escaped through it, noticing a door at the end of the corridor out of the corner of his eye. His flow is interrupted by the TARDIS' cloister bell and he runs back to it, needing to launch it to keep the engines from burning. He promises to return for Amelia in five minutes' time and disappears inside, pulling the doors closed as the TARDIS dematerialises. After it's gone, Amelia runs back inside and gathers a suitcase full of possessions for when he returns, sitting out in the garden waiting for him to come back, failing to notice the other door has opened slightly. When the TARDIS returns, it's daytime and the Doctor rushes back to the house to get Amelia out, having realised that she was in danger. He breaks himself in but can't find Amelia, only to be knocked unconscious by somebody with a cricket bat. Meanwhile, at a nearby hospital, nurse Rory Williams attempts to convince his superior Dr. Ramsden that he's seen one of the coma patients out in public, but she dismisses his claims as impossible ramblings and sends him home. The Doctor wakes up in Amelia's house, handcuffed to the radiator by a long-legged, red-haired policewoman who tells him that Amelia Pond hasn't lived in the house for six months. The Doctor addresses her to the sixth room on the floor, the one door she'd never noticed before seeing it in the corner of her eye. Against his instruction, she goes into the room; he tries to unlock the cuffs with his screwdriver but finds it missing. The policewoman finds the screwdriver on the table in the room and he insists that she gets out. In the room, a snake-like alien moves around her avoiding eye-sight until she finally catches sight of it and she flees the room. The Doctor locks it with his screwdriver as it starts to change form inside the room. It breaks down the door in the form of one of the hospital's coma patients and his dog. It appears about to attack when a loud voice calls from outside, ordering Prisoner Zero to vacate the human residence or it will be incinerated. As it disappears into another room, the Doctor unlocks his cuffs with his buggy screwdriver and they leave the house. Before they get off the property, the Doctor notices a garden shed in place of the one he destroyed last time he was there. He determines the shed to have been there for about twelve years, making him over a decade too late; he demands to know why the "policewoman", who had only been pretended to be so while in actuality a kissogram, told him Amelia had been gone for six months when she angrily asks him why he'd promised her five minutes. Prisoner Zero watches them flee into the village while the Doctor concludes that the woman was really Amelia, who is now using the name Amy, as she lays into him about being as late as he is. They hear the same ominous warning over the speakers of a nearby ice cream van. They rush into a friend of Amy's that has the broadcast playing on every television channel; the elderly woman, Mrs Angelo, recognises as the Doctor as Amy's childhood imaginary friend. The Doctor deduces that by the human residence, the alien entities in orbit are referring not to Amy's house but to the planet, promising to incinerate it in 20 minutes. Taking a look through the village where there is nowhere of utility, the Doctor collapses, still in the process of regenerating. The sun suddenly eclipses inside a force field and everybody looks up and photographs; in the corner of his eye, he notices Rory taking photos of the man and dog rather than focusing on the strange occurrence to the sun. He asks Amy to help him save the planet, but she just shuts his tie in a car door and locks it, demanding to know who he really is. To convince her to trust him, the Doctor gives her an apple she'd given him as a little girl and promises that everything that is happening is real. The gambit works and she releases him; he races over and grabs the phone off Rory, whom Amy is dating, and discerns that all the forms that Prisoner Zero has taken are those of coma patients, so it could take their forms from dormant but living minds. Prisoner Zero shouts at them (with a dog's bark) as it's jailers, the Atraxi, descend from the sky and the Doctor tries to draw it's attention by overriding various electrical devices with his screwdriver, trying to make a noise loud enough to attract it. However, the effort overloads and destroys the sonic and Prisoner Zero escapes. Needing to draw it out into the open, the Doctor sends Amy and Rory to the hospital to evacuate the coma ward while he returns to Mrs Angelo's house and uses her grandson Jeff's laptop to hack into a conference call with major planet figureheads in alien knowledge and sends them a virus that would help him draw the Atraxi's attention to Prisoner Zero before heading to the hospital to meet Amy and Rory in a fire engine. At the hospital, Amy, still dressed up as a policewoman, evacuates the floor when she and Rory encounter Prisoner Zero, disguised as a mother and two children that chases them to the other end of the ward. The Doctor arrives, smashing his way through the window and his virus is triggered, resetting all the clocks in the world to zero at the same moment, drawing the Atraxi's attention before he sends them the pictures of all of it's disguises. To keep itself from being detected, it takes the form of young Amelia and the Doctor from Amy's dreams while she falls unconscious. The Doctor gets through to Amy in her sleep and gets her to dream about Prisoner Zero's true form so that it takes it's own true form as a disguise. The Atraxi are able to find and restrain it; as it's taken away, it warns the Doctor that 'Silence will fall'. While Amy and Rory are relieved that the Atraxi are gone, the Doctor calls them and beckons them back to ensure that they leave for good. Getting a change of clothes on his way up to the roof, the Doctor confronts the Atraxi and gets them to look at all the threats that have befallen the Earth and makes them aware that in every single incursion, he's been there to stop them - he then orders them to run. The Atraxi then leave the planet, this time never to return. As they leave, the TARDIS key suddenly burns in the Doctor's pocket, informing him that the ship is finished reconstructing. He runs all the way back to Amy's house and looks at the new interior of his ship before disappearing inside and leaving. Amy and Rory arrive to watch him depart with Amy looking on sadly, think that he's left her again. Some time later, the TARDIS lands back in Amy's garden in the middle of the night and the Doctor learns from an indignant Amy that the incursion with Prisoner Zero and the Atraxi happened two years beforehand. Nonetheless, the Doctor asks Amy to come with him and she is initially reluctant so he lets her into the newly reconstructed TARDIS and she stands in awe of the new control room. Amy asks the Doctor why he's asking her to come with him and he's insisting that he just yearns for company; she then goes on to request a return five minutes after they leave and queries that for a time, she'd started to believe that he was simply a mad man with a box. The Doctor tells her to remember one vital piece of information that her life may one day depend on - he is definitely a mad man in a box. With all said, the Doctor rips the engines into action and the TARDIS takes off from Amy's house. Inside her bedroom, she still has all of her puppets and drawings of the Doctor sitting around - and a wedding dress hanging on the wardrobe. Cast * The Doctor - Matt Smith * Amy Pond - Karen Gillan * Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill * Amelia - Caitlin Blackwood * Dr Ramsden - Nina Wadia * Barney Collins - Marcello Magni * Ice cream man - Perry Benson * Mrs Angelo - Annette Crosbie * Jeff - Tom Hopper * Mr Henderson - Arthur Cox * Mother - Olivia Coleman * Child 1 - Eden Monteath * Child 2 - Merin Monteath * Atraxi voice - David de Keyser * Prisoner Zero voice - William Wilde * As himself - Patrick Moore Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''The Eleventh Hour'' page on '''Doctor Who Website